Great Raft Brewing has partnered with a local Shreveport bakery to bake unique dog treats in an effort to reduce waste and help a Shreveport animal shelter.

Starting this month, Great Raft Brewing and Blake Jackson of Drake Catering will begin making Doggie Beer Biscuits – tasty, healthy treats made for dogs of all sizes. Great Raft Brewing donates the spent grain and Drake donates the other treat ingredients of flour, peanut butter and honey, and then bakes the treats once a month. The dog treats, which are all natural and contain no alcohol, hops, chemicals, preservatives or artificial flavors, are packaged and will be sold at the Great Raft Brewing tasting room for $8 per bag. The Humane Society of Northwest Louisiana, a local no-kill animal shelter, will receive 100 percent of the profits.

“Great Raft has been trying to find a way to get the Doggie Beer Biscuit program off the ground for months and Drake Catering shares the same care for the local animal population that we do, ” said Lindsay Nations, co-founder and vice president of Great Raft Brewing. “This is a wonderful opportunity to make something beneficial from otherwise useless grains, and we hope this program will help the local Humane Society to do more of the wonderful work they already do saving and re-homing area dogs.”

Each time Great Raft brews a batch of beer, it uses approximately 1,500 pounds of the highest-quality malted barley. Once the sugary liquid is extracted from the grains, the grains are removed and no longer needed in the brewing process. This “spent grain” still has nutritional value and can be recycled beyond the brewing process.

Great Raft and Drake Catering will use about fifty pounds of grain monthly to make the treats. The rest of the grain will continue to go to a local farmer who feeds the grains to his cattle on a nearby farm. All of the grains used to brew beer at Great Raft Brewing are recycled and used, without any going to waste.

“From day one, Great Raft Brewing has been committed to demonstrating their support and devotion to the local community, and now that includes our most prized clients – dogs,” said Courtney Wingate of the Humane Society of Northwest Louisiana. “We will use the proceeds from Doggie Beer Biscuits to help pay our vet bills which average $5,000 a month, and we couldn’t be more thankful.”

In addition to this new partnership with the Humane Society of Northwest Louisiana, Great Raft Brewing has demonstrated passion for animals in a variety of ways – over the past year of operations, the brewery has actively collected monetary donations and necessary items for a broad group of area shelters. Each month the brewery select a different area shelter, posts a list of items that shelter needs most at the tasting room and on the brewery website, and collects donations from generous brewery customers.